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Comment by stormdennis | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to know what happened to Squash. Up until the mid 90s or so it was really popular. Then it seemed like everyone stopped playing and courts closed left right and centre

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I tried to get into it recently and found the cost prohibitively expensive to play casually.

Contrast with Pickleball- for $100 I have a racket and balls and can play on courts, if I pay $300 I can play almost anywhere, and that is the lifetime cost

Racquet sports and fitness trends come and go. When I was a kid, decades ago, squash was niche but well known, kids like me and my friends spent hours playing variations of table tennis, "pelota" was a cheap game with made-up rules ("tedesca" was another one, but on the soccer field, some of my older compatriots might remember), and "aerobics" was trendy in the few gyms that operated at the time. Tennis always had a hard core group of participants, and padel is nowadays, by far, the most popular racquet sports in latin or latin-adjacent countries.

I wonder if it's because squash courts are a pain to keep clean - they're a magnet for scuff-marks from the balls (and racquets...).

I played in racquetball leagues in the late '80s and early '90s. Same thing happened.

We had a raquetball court in my college dorm, which had been converted from an old city hotel. A friend knew the rules and invited me to play, and I ended up getting a set of rackets and balls. It was a lot of fun, and a real workout. This was in 1990. I never saw a court or an opportunity to play again after I moved out of the area.

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